Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

  “Finally he addressed the ‘fresh inheritance’ of Miss April Burke of London, who in the meantime had become the wife of Mr. Stephen Somerville, K.C.

  “The learned judge likened her lawyer's presentation to ‘a mystery and its attempted solution.’ Family trees had been climbed and their branches shaken and their roots pulled out, scrutinized minutely, and stuck back in the ground. Valiant efforts had been made by Miss Burke's lawyers, who ‘trod the avenue of probability with great determination.’ Miss Burke herself had been a ‘more than sincere witness’ in the decisions that would affect her own destiny.

  “She had also provided her late father's sole family heirloom—a drawing of the property in Tipperary that had been given him as an infant. The judge said he had taken ‘personal care’ to assure himself that the drawing was indeed an accurate likeness of the property, that he was satisfied on the point. He must also acknowledge—in the spirit of the law, he said, if not the letter—the power of such a piece of evidence in the family's belief of their rights to this property.

  “Without the under-strengthening force, he said, of long-standing family beliefs and traditions, Society, in his opinion, would collapse. He felt ‘obliged to point out’ that all Irish people depended upon family beliefs in the pursuit of their rights to their land.

  “In his conclusions, the learned judge cited only two passages of evidence”—these were asterisked by Mr. Prunty in the transcripts—“and they came from his section on Miss Burke's claim. The learned judge drew upon this evidence to adduce the integrity of Mr. O'Brien's testimony. He said that Mr. Noonan had defeated his own case by, in effect, trying to prove opposites: that Miss Burke (as she had been at the case's outset) had sufficiently poor character to use Mr. O'Brien in a misleading way, and would therefore prove base enough to lay false claims. Yet the rejected suitor, who, Mr. Noonan hoped had good reason to despise her, had testified with great strength as to her ‘natural connection’ to the estate.

  “In eventually finding for Mrs. Burke-Somerville, and in awarding her costs and compensation for Chancery's neglect of the house in its vacated state, the learned judge garlanded his Judgment with caution. The final paragraph of his Judgment reads: ‘I am aware that I am standing on grounds more fought over than anything in the Bible, capable of igniting more fire than Vesuvius. And yet a bridgehead must be established. We own what we know we own, and the knowing forms a central claim to what I may define as Notional Title. If Notional Title can be supported by evidence of any kind—even evidence that has been clouded by the mists of time and unrecorded circumstances, and by the furtiveness of the past—if such cloudy evidence points toward Notional Title, then, as in this case, I feel sure that the law must behave as in Nature, and observe the principle of Natural Home. And so, Notional Title becomes Natural Title.’ ”

  The two pieces of evidence asterisked by Mr. Prunty run as follows in the transcript:

  Mr. Stephen Somerville: What made you believe in your and your father's rights to this property?

  Miss Burke: It is something that I simply knew was right from the moment I heard of it.

  Mr. Somerville: How old were you when you first heard of Tipperary Castle?

  Miss Burke: I believe about ten years old.

  Mr. Somerville: And when you went there—at, I believe, the age of twenty-two?

  Miss Burke: I felt that I had come home. It is something that I cannot describe.

  Mr. Dermot Noonan, cross-examining: How closely did you observe Miss Burke's demeanor on that day?

  Mr. O'Brien: Very attentively.

  Mr. Noonan: Which is why you have felt able to tell the court that she seemed “so at one”—your term—with Tipperary Castle and its land?

  Mr. O'Brien: She seemed wonderfully natural when there. And it is my belief that she had never been in an Irish field in her life. She lived in London.

  Mr. Noonan: You were in love with her in those days, were you not?

  Mr. O'Brien: Yes.

  Mr. Noonan: And therefore biased in her favor, surely?

  Mr. O'Brien: Justice must always supersede love.

  Mr. Noonan: But you are prepared to give evidence in her favor?

  Mr. O'Brien: If honest to do so, yes.

  Mr. Noonan: Are you still in love with her?

  Mr. O'Brien: That is an entirely improper question. She has married.

  5

  The estate of Tipperary Castle was awarded to April Somerville in 1911. All over the county few people talked of anything else. The archives of The Nationalist in Clonmel show the coverage—page after page, week after week.

  Opinion split three ways. The Anglo-Irish welcomed somebody who had married one of their own: now those who wanted to stay on in their estates felt strengthened. Moderate Irish people felt perhaps that some kind of ancestral justice had been done to the name of Burke but also felt a little cheated at the entry of a Somerville—a Protestant. And republicans, dreaming of independence and the recovery of all ancestral lands, fumed at the loss of thousands of rich acres.

  By now, Joe Harney had gone to Queen's College in Cork (today, University College Cork). And Charles distributed his life between lingering at home, visiting and staying with various friends, such as Lady Mollie Carew, and—far fewer—bouts of travel as a healer.

  During weekends, Harney took the train to Tipperary and stayed with the O'Briens, even when Charles had gone elsewhere. On vacations, though, he traveled with Charles, and his company may have been enjoyable, but it must also have proven distracting. The evidence—or lack of it—suggests that Charles compiled little observation of the country's social and political life during that time. Nor does he seem to have made any significant contribution to newspapers or journals.

  It's not as though he lacked matter to report or comment upon. Ireland raged with talk of Home Rule or the possibility of a republican insurgency. Europe—and the world—fretted about the probability of a war declared by Germany. Both issues had a synergy, because Irish activists saw in the likelihood of a war a chance to put on pressure and achieve, as a beginning, Home Rule.

  Given all of this material and, as we have already seen, Charles's liking for discussing the events on a large stage, his silence seems peculiar. The answer comes in his mother's journal for Sunday, 25 January 1914. By and large, her weekend entries were her longest; this was an exception.

  It is over. The dread that I have carried for more than forty years has arrived. Its cargo will become the weight I bear now to my grave. We buried my beloved son on Friday. In the rain and sleet we lowered him into the ground. I am unable to sit or stand. My heart is screaming. It is against the law of the world that a child should pre-decease its parents.

  Poor Euclid, how I shall miss him. When the hour comes tomorrow that I should wake him from his afternoon sleep, and give him a cup of tea—what shall I do? It is ten o'clock and the night outside is quiet. I shall not sleep. Nor will Bernard, who is speechless with grief.

  As this is a History of my own life as well as of my country in my time, I shall here acknowledge my brother, Euclid. He passed away on a January day when we all sat with him. I have seen patients die, I have seen them struggle to live, despite their mortal ailments, and I have seen them slip away as quietly and swiftly as a fish into a dark pool. Euclid lingered; he rallied—two, three, four times. If he knew that he was passing from us, he did not say.

  In the previous few years he had grown frailer by the month, then by the week; and since Christmas, by the day. Seeing his condition, I had not returned to the road. In the second week of January, Mother asked Father and me whether we should place Euclid's bed by the fire in the larger drawing-room—what we call the Terrace Room—because the long windows give out onto the terrace and thence with a view to the wood. That day, with much effort, we moved a spare bed to a place near the fire; and a day-bed into the room, also, where I lay many nights, talking to him, telling him “tales from the road,” as he called them. I carried Euclid downstairs on
the day we moved his bed; I have carried five-year-old children who weighted heavier.

  He had, Mother now says, ailed since birth. Food never sat well with him; he picked here and there at his plate, he ate like a bird and not a beast. Thin since infancy, he never gained a continuous robustness. I recall no more than two summers, and those not in succession, when Euclid looked strong and healthy, and even then, the impression came principally from the sun's tanning of his face.

  We have never known the name or cause or root of his ailment. I believe that he had a weakness since birth, that he lacked a density of blood. He was born into a household where his three family members bulge with energy—and he was granted none.

  But he had the grandest soul. He had wit, humor, quickness, and a fire in his heart that, had it warmed his body, would have taken him upright through life. I believe that he was undermined by his own puzzlement at what ailed him, and that he railed at whatever denied him the same physical force as his father, mother, or brother.

  He attempted to compensate with deliberate oddity in his demeanor, and with out-of-the-ordinary intellectual inquiry. Too poorly always to join a college or university, he surrounded himself with books—of all kinds, on all manner of subjects. To Euclid, the discovery of a new fact was as a gemstone to a lady; it thrilled him, he turned it this way and that, to let the light shine on it, and he carried it with him proudly, his beauty enhanced by showing it to the world.

  I believe that he decided to die. The new place to lie, close to the heart of the house, rather than remote in his bedroom, seemed to elevate him for a time. He much enjoyed the flames in the larger fireplace; he found the influx of company exciting—because those who called to the house now engaged with him, brought him news. Perhaps we made the move too late— many years too late. Had we sacrificed the Terrace Room earlier, would the energy of the world,as it came to our door, have kept him alive?

  But I believe that he had already taken his decision.

  He told nobody. On the Sunday, I was sitting with him at two o'clock in the afternoon. The fire blazed; Mother and Father had driven to Holycross, where our long-retired and now ancient housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, had fallen ill. Euclid took a little soup, no more than a spoon or two, and he had said little all day. Then he spoke.

  “What do you offer for a pain in the chest and arms?”

  I asked him, “Show me where.”

  “It's been here”—he indicated his left shoulder and upper arm— “since Thursday; it keeps coming back.”

  I said, “Let me get my bags.”

  Euclid shook his head. “I can't take anything. My mouth, my throat—I have no way of doing it.”

  I helped him to sit up a little, but after a few minutes he said, “I want to lie flat.”

  Those were almost his last words. Mother and Father returned soon and did not need to be told. Their eyes, when they turned to me, were filled with darkness; it is a sight I have seen often, the sight of fear entering a person's soul when they know in their heart that a loved one is going to die.

  Did we sleep, any of us, for the rest of the week? I think not. If I went to bed any night, I woke again after an hour or two—and came downstairs to find Mother or my father, or both, sitting in the shadows thrown by the fire. Mother read to Euclid; he liked Tennyson and Coleridge, and I heard “on either side the river lie/Long fields of barley and of rye,” and I heard of painted ships on painted oceans.

  We were all present when he went. He had been lying quieter and quieter, taking no food, sweating a little. At eleven o'clock in the morning, he raised a hand to his left shoulder, said, “This hurts,” and then sighed. He did not move or cry out; nor did his throat rattle. None of the things of Death came to his bedside; he merely went away. Father rose from his chair by the fire and spread his hands out from his body, opening and clenching his fists, opening and clenching, and blinking his eyes. And Mother said, looking at me with eyes wide open as though in surprise, “Now what will any of us do?”

  Eight months after Euclid O’Brien's death, the Great War began, in September 1914. All summer it had rumbled. After the Serbs had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, blood began to seep across the jigsaw of Europe. Germany invaded Belgium, and England called for all to rally in the defense of small nations.

  In Ireland, the call was accompanied by a seeming promise of Home Rule in exchange for enlisting. There was also the fact that the army was, at least, a job. All in all, around three hundred thousand Irishmen died on the green fields of France. In terms of population, that proportionately represented nearly five times the number of men that England lost. Home Rule never came.

  Almost regardless of their age, Irish farmers' sons had turned up to enlist, as had laborers, mechanics, policemen, doctors, clerks, fishermen, bankers, plowmen, bakers, lawyers—and Charles O'Brien. He told Joe Harney that he had “come adrift when Euclid died” and did not know what to do with himself.

  Harney tried to stop him. He had successfully dissuaded many other men. Harney had his own reasons for not wanting to see Irishmen join the British army. He knew that any man in a British military uniform was about to become a “legitimate target” in Ireland, according to plans in the pipeline for a rebellion.

  Charles, nevertheless, went to the school in Golden and met the recruiting officers. According to the records, he was turned down for military service because the shooting had left him with a slight limp in his left leg—and, a secondary reason, because he was “much too old.” He doesn't record his effort to enlist. Instead, at that point in his writings, he curiously recounts an earlier experience, the point of which becomes clear only later.

  When I reflect upon the great changes I saw in Ireland, I am bound to record a remarkable, daily, and distressing occurrence. Riding here and there, I often saw individuals and, sadder still, entire families on the road, laden with baggages, sometimes on a cart, sometimes walking. Always I knew their business, yet always I asked—and always I received the same answer: they were bound for the emigrant ship.

  I know that had I kept a count, the numbers would run to many, many thousands. It occurs to me now that the reason I have not discussed them earlier is on account of their commonplaceness—I saw them all the time. Near the great ports of the coast, they grew more numerous. Once, I rode into Galway from the east and I might have been attending a funeral procession, so singular was the line of men, women, and children trudging to the ships. This sight—and this is what I mean by commonplace—had been familiar to me all my life.

  Overriding the protestations of his mother, Charles O'Brien decided, in the spring of 1915, to emigrate to the United States. Amelia argued that he had no visible future there, whereas if he stayed at home, at least he could live on the farm. It's clear from her journal that she even suggested that he study medicine at the Queen's College, Cork. Given some connections there, and an ability to pay a handsome fee, age would be no barrier.

  Joe Harney had completed his studies. He worked in Dublin, a junior civil servant in the government land registry. This gave him less time to visit the O'Briens or be a companion to Charles. Amelia wrote Harney an anguished letter, which stayed in his family's possession:

  He says that he feels Ireland a desert now, with Euclid gone, with April lost to him, and you permanently at work. He won't take over the farm— he says he is not a farmer, that he has no feeling for it, much though he loves our fields and our animals.

  But his decision has been a sudden one, and I feel that he has another reason, too painful to share. Now that “she's” living in the castle, he sees “her” many times a week, always in the distance. He rides to the village. He has seen her in the town. He has to hear her being addressed as “Mrs. Somerville.” And they have never, so far as I know, conversed.

  Although he doesn't speak of her, I know that in his heart he has never let go of her—and we have all heard of such attachments. In Charles's case, I am certain that it wi
ll last for his whole life.

  Lately, he must have suffered new distress, because the talk locally is that such work as they have begun on the repairs of the castle has gone badly. Most of the workmen have fallen out with Mr. Somerville, who is drinking heavily and arguing with the workers. It has been stop and start and stop again. They say that, instead of progressing, their restoration has gone backward—that fresh damage has occurred owing to carelessness. Or—who knows?—malice. This must appall Charles. I am sure that he knows of it, because everybody else does.

  Harney replied to Amelia, saying that over Easter he would come to Ardobreen. But Harney's train was delayed, and Charles, deciding that Harney was not coming, left. His father drove him to Tipperary, where Charles caught a train to Limerick.

  Later that night, Harney arrived, just as Amelia and Bernard O'Brien were preparing to go to bed. She describes the moment in her journal: “Somebody hammered too hard on the door. Bernard said, ‘Harney.’ I said I doubted it. Bernard said, ‘He's excited.’ We looked out of the window. It was Harney. I went downstairs and let him in. He seemed very agitated. As he had not eaten, I led him to the kitchen. He ate some cold chicken. Carefully, to take account of his state, I told him that Charles had gone. He jumped up from his chair. ‘Oh, my God in Heaven,’ he cried. I calmed him—or tried to. Then he stood in front of me, almost shaking.

  “Mrs. O'Brien,” he said. “I heard it on the train. Stephen Somerville was killed. In France. In the war. He went there as an officer last week and was killed his first day out.”

  6

  That was Easter weekend 1915—to put a date on it, Easter Sunday fell on 4 April. Euclid had died, leaving behind, by the way, a massive fortune in investments; he had spent most of his life writing to stockbrokers and banks, and almost without exception every investment that he made paid off in multiple percentages. But Charles had reached a point where he'd decided that there was nothing left for him in Ireland.